Set up a testimonials category — no need for a plugin.

There are a couple of plugins designed specifically for testimonials, but I didn’t want to use them; they use their own databases, and don’t keep with WordPress’ simplicity. If possible, the best way to work with WordPress is to use it’s built-in functionality.

I also wanted to have the testimonials as a category in WP, rather than as a separate plugin. This code will work for any type of category, not just a testimonial.

I use LesterChan‘s Download Manager plugin, and it’s great. Good interface, simple purpose.

I recently found out that after upgrading a client’s site to WP 2.5, WP-DownloadManager was no longer working. I followed the documentation on the plugin website, including resetting the permalink structure, but nothing worked.

I am designing and creating a real estate website with WordPress, and I’m going to be writing a few articles that detail how it’s done. This article will get you started — please leave feedback with any questions or topic requests for the next installment. Real estate using WordPress Part 2 is now available!

A little background — why use WordPress?

I’m working with a Denver company on a real estate website. Their goal is to showcase their listings in an easy-to-update CMS.

I’ve worked with Open-Realty, and — to say it bluntly — it’s a huge pain in the ass. When you scratch the surface of OR, you begin to realize how cobbled together it is. Customizing the code to work as it should requires a steep learning curve. The templates are relatively simple to work with, but the administration section is horrible. The Open Realty user experience is just awful.

When I think SEO, I think of Google. Why? Is it because Google’s PageRank system determines better websites? Is it because Google’s advertising options are superior? It’s as simple as this: Google gets better results than any other search engine.

The major search engines often don’t agree

Optimizing websites for search is frustrating sometimes. The biggest search engines are Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. The frustrating part of optimization is the variation between the search engines. The variations in ranking can be huge. I will use Katz Web Design’s ranking information to show some examples:

Google

Yahoo!

MSN

Difference

Denver Web Designer

1

8

3

4

Lakewood Website Design

26

7

298

292

Web Design Denver

27

52

103

66

Denver Web Page Design

20

519

> 1000

Over 980!

So you see, there’s a crazy variation between the search engines that can be frustrating. My statistics show, however, that even a bad ranking in Google is better than a good ranking on any other search engine.

Ranking Update:

Since I wrote this post, my site has come up significantly in search results for the terms listed. As a result, the disparity of the results is much less than it had been. Here are the stats as of November 8, 2008:

Google

Yahoo!

MSN

Difference

Denver Web Designer

3

3

2

1

Lakewood Website Design

359

120

96

263

Web Design Denver

27

11

18

16

Denver Web Page Design

24

2

3

22

92% of my organic keyword search traffic comes from Google

A vast majority of my traffic to my website comes from Google. What about my some of my clients?

Google %

Yahoo %

MSN %

Google % Difference

Client A

83.1

6.6

7

76.1

Client B

85.9

6.73

5.74

79.17

Client C

70.4

20.37

0

50.03

Client D

80.4

8.1

8.0

72.3

These clients have similar ranking placement on Google, MSN, and Yahoo! for many of their keywords. You can see that even so, Google still sends an average of 69.4% more visitors to these websites. Optimizing for other search engines doesn’t have the same return on investment as optimizing for Google does. Google remains king.

What’s your experience with optimizing for various keywords across the search engines?

When you first move to a new city, you aren’t familiar with the roads. You buy a map to help guide you, you ask Google how to get you from here to there most efficiently, and you stop and ask people directions.

After you’ve lived in the city for a while, you become familiar and confident. You start to understand the road naming conventions, the north/south corridors that are the fastest, the quickest way downtown from your location.

The more experience you have with the city, the better you understand how to arrive exactly where you want to without running into any snags. But yet, there’s always more to learn.

Like a city, every profession has its own learning curve. Are you exploring past your comfort zone?

Customizing under the hood

I was talking with one of my clients who is a mechanic, and he was telling me about how he used to do a lot of car customization and performance enhancing, and that he really loved it.He told me that the problem with customizing cars is that when you start tinkering around under the hood, every little change presents new problems that need fixing, and soon, the project becomes unmanageable.

I’ve done my deal of modifying code (check out this custom XHTML osCommerce installation) and let me tell you: it doesn’t pay. My clients generally don’t care about how the site is tableless, CSS/XHTML valid, et cetera. They want to know that it works properly.

WordPress is beautiful and talks sweet to me.

WordPress is my dream in that regard: it’s beautifully coded out of the box so that creating templates is a logical, simple project. They make functions such as is_page() that allow you to simply ask “Is this the page I think it is?,” then continue to make progress. WordPress is my love. I will continue to be her bedfellow codefellow.

Both my mechanic client and I agreed: customizing is great fun, and very personally rewarding in the end. However, it’s a huge pain in the ass, and the rewards rarely (if ever) equal the effort.

Integrating Call Me Link into Your Website

VonageMe™ is a new service from the VoIP service Vonage. If you have service from Vonage, you should have a VonageMe account.

How to set up click to talk using Vonage

Vonage uses a simple form to enable the calling feature. Instead of using their form, you can style your own…or you can create an anchor link using the following pattern:https://me.vonage.com/username?fromnumber=12223334444For me, that code translates to https://me.vonage.com/303zachary?fromnumber=13035551212

Three steps to VoIP fun!

Go to me.vonage.com and sign in using your Vonage account login (this is to confirm you have the service).

Fill in their information if you want, but it’s not necessary—you will see why next.

Create a HTML form on your website with a text input with id/name “fromnumber” and the form action as https://me.vonage.com/username, with username being your Vonage username.

Next steps for even better results

Using simple form validation Javascript, you will be able to weed out people who use dashes and spaces in their phone numbers, or even better, create a script to automatically reformat them.View Update below.

You can try the code out on my website as it’s currently formated. It uses the exact code from above, but replaces username with my Vonage username, 303zachary.

Update:

I’ve used the Adobe Spry Validation Widget to make sure that the phone number is properly entered. Below is the code to ensure proper number formatting: